Friday, February 18th 2022
Intel Raptor Lake with 24 Cores and 32 Threads Demoed
When Intel announced the company's first hybrid design, codenamed Alder Lake, we expected to see more of such design philosophies in future products. During Intel's 2022 investor meeting day, the company provided insights into future developments, and a successor to Alder Lake is no different. Codenamed "Raptor Lake," it features a novel Raptor Cove P-core design that is supposed to bring significant IPC uplift from the previous generation of processors. Using Intel 7 processor node, Raptor Lake brings a similar ecosystem of features to Alder Lake, however, with improved performance across the board.
Perhaps one of the most exciting things to note about Raptor Lake is the advancement in core count, specifically the increase in E-cores. Instead of eight P-cores and eight E-cores like Alder Lake, the Raptor Lake design will retain eight P-cores and double the E-core count to 16. It was a weird decision on Intel's end; however, it surely isn't anything terrible. The total number of cores now jumps to 24, and the total number of threads reaches 32. Additionally, Raptor Lake will bring some additional overclocking improvement features and retain socket compatibility with Alder Lake motherboards. That means that, at worst, you would need to perform a BIOS update to get your previous system ready for new hardware. We assume that Intel has been working with software vendors and its engineering team to optimize core utilization for this next-generation processor, even though they have more E-cores present. Below, we can see Intel's demonstration of Raptor Lake running Blender and Adobe Premiere and the CPU core utilization.
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Perhaps one of the most exciting things to note about Raptor Lake is the advancement in core count, specifically the increase in E-cores. Instead of eight P-cores and eight E-cores like Alder Lake, the Raptor Lake design will retain eight P-cores and double the E-core count to 16. It was a weird decision on Intel's end; however, it surely isn't anything terrible. The total number of cores now jumps to 24, and the total number of threads reaches 32. Additionally, Raptor Lake will bring some additional overclocking improvement features and retain socket compatibility with Alder Lake motherboards. That means that, at worst, you would need to perform a BIOS update to get your previous system ready for new hardware. We assume that Intel has been working with software vendors and its engineering team to optimize core utilization for this next-generation processor, even though they have more E-cores present. Below, we can see Intel's demonstration of Raptor Lake running Blender and Adobe Premiere and the CPU core utilization.
153 Comments on Intel Raptor Lake with 24 Cores and 32 Threads Demoed
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Doesn't mean they won't make changes to the platform.
How many LGA-115x platforms are there?
P cores do not have worse power efficiency. They have worse area efficiency. And area efficiency is very important on EUV nodes as EUV nodes are very expensive.We should be get a 8 P core + 0 E core chip too. Just like we have a 6 P + 0 E chip this generation.
See... the problem is, we can bounce that ball back to AMD just as well. Let's rewind - was there ANY news item like this at the time of Piledriver/Bulldozer that said 'you get 8 cores that aren't real cores', versus the Intel quad fest? I don't think so. But AMD did build a far worse performing solution, even the Intel Quads it was marketing against (quite explicitly, too) were often faster, especially in single threaded applications.
These are new technologies - both the chiplet approach and getting a fast interconnect to pull them together, and Intel's approach to higher core counts with some bigLittle thing. The technologies are, right now, competing. It remains to be seen what will 'win' in the end, or maybe we'll even get and keep both for longer periods of time. Maybe one technology works for a consumer segment, while another works for enterprise/datacenter?
Maybe Zen will adopt a big little + Chiplet approach one day?
Maybe Intel will do the same?
We can't tell. So its not far fetched to market cores as cores and distinguish them as E-cores. Intel isn't doing much different: they're saying 'these are the configs: P+E and the result is X cores Y threads'. That's as honest as you're going to get.
So is it really just marketing? And if it was, what was Piledriver and Bulldozer then? Those were cores with shared resources just the same, except implemented in a way nobody had a use for.
I never bought a Bulldozer CPU, with an exception of a short period having an FM2+ APU(bought it for the integrated GPU, not the CPU part), because those Bulldozers where not real 4-6-8 core CPUs. Just marketing.
Listed in red, in this test, all 8P+8E cores fully loaded (on DDR5), we get a CPU package power of 259 W. The progression from idle to load is steady, although there is a big jump from idle to single core. When one core is loaded, we go from 7 W to 78 W, which is a big 71 W jump. Because this is package power (the output for core power had some issues), this does include firing up the ring, the L3 cache, and the DRAM controller, but even if that makes 20% of the difference, we’re still looking at ~55-60 W enabled for a single core. By comparison, for our single thread SPEC power testing on Linux, we see a more modest 25-30W per core, which we put down to POV-Ray’s instruction density.
By contrast, in green, the E-cores only jump from 5 W to 15 W when a single core is active, and that is the same number as we see on SPEC power testing. Using all the E-cores, at 3.9 GHz, brings the package power up to 48 W total.
4 E-cores are not only significantly faster in MT workloads vs 1 P core, they also consume less power. It was all discussed at least three months ago and people still continue to misunderstand ADL.
8 P cores = 239 watts, 1 P core = 78 watts => Difference is 161 watts -> Divide this by 7 = 23 watts per core
8 E cores = 48 watts, 1 E core = 15 watts => Difference is 33 watts -> Divide by 7 => 4.7 watts per core
That is a massive difference in terms of power consumption.
No we have now to be thankful to Intel for blurring the lines between Atom CPUs and what we knew as Core CPUs until recently. We should be thankful to Intel because in the future we will be getting CPUs with more E cores than P cores. We shouldn't be complaining because what the hell are we doing with our desktops anyway? Why pay $500-700 for 16 P cores when we can pay the same and get 8 P and 8 E cores? Why pay today $800-$1000 for 24 P cores, when we can pay in the future the same for 8 P and 16 E cores? Why pay $1500 for 32 P cores, when we can pay the same in the future for 8 P and 24 E cores?
Intel, AMD, Nvidia, they are not football teams. Their gains are not always something to cheer for. Finding ways to maximize their profits, it's good, but not always something to make us happy. AMD will follow with Zen4c cores and we will end up paying for performance cores and only getting a percentage of performance cores in the final product.